Creativity, Curiosity, Community

From Father to Son

Over a considerable number of years now, I have kept every pair of jeans belonging to me and my husband that we no longer wear…that is, all those jeans with excessive holes in rendering them inappropriate for polite society! I haven’t been able to bring myself to throw them away because aside from the obvious holes there is a fair amount of good quality denim to be used – and it turns out I am a hoarder of fabric scraps!

I recently had a clear out of my fabric boxes and discovered the extent of this habit. It wouldn’t be so bad if I was a quilter but I’m mostly not. And so I found myself with a whole black sack worth of 10 cm or less scraps, which I wasn’t going to use any time soon. Having cleared them out of the boxes, they remain in the black sack some 3 months later because I still can’t quite bring myself to just throw them away. Sewing, it turns out, can be a very wasteful hobby. If anyone has any ideas what I could do with them, please do let me know!

Anyway, back to the jeans! I wanted to make some shorts for the Little Man and decided there would definitely be enough fabric in a pair of my husband’s old jeans to do so. I used the Peek-a-boo Patterns Day Camp shorts pattern – so simple only requiring two pieces and some 3/4 inch elastic. I couldn’t quite avoid all holes in the denim and had to patch one near the waistband. That aside, they came together very quickly. They’re not perfect but perfectly adequate for preschool, where no clothes survive the pen and paint! And they’ve saved money as well as avoiding me sending yet more scraps to landfill (via a 6 month wait in a black sack!).